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Ralph Waldo Emerson -
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Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we should be low; for we musthave a society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is easy for sugar to be sweet and for nitre to be salt.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nature is good, but intellect is better, as the law-giver is before the law-receiver.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Freedom is the essence of this faith. It has for its object simply to make men good and wise. Its institutions then should be as flexible as the wants of men. That form out of which the life and suitableness have departed should be as worthless in its eyes as the dead leaves that are falling around us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed in retirement.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so much, that the variations of form are unimportant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man should not be a silkworm; nor a nation a tent of caterpillars.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The intelligent have a right over the ignorant; namely, the right of instructing them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors. They are a class of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they should do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit, in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by anything short- livedor local, but abode by real and abiding traits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; a science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences - I call it Dialectic - which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence; without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy is noninterference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave and persevering.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Creative Commons
Born:
May 25, 1803
Died:
April 27, 1882
(aged 78)
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